Black Banking and the 21st Century

January 18, 2026—Beginning in the summer of 2020 there was a short-lived racial reckoning that many in Black America predicted, correctly, would soon fadeaway. It happened in the wake of the March 2020 murder of Breonna Taylor by Louisville, Kentucky police officers who raided her home in the middle of the night. Additionally, the released recording of the unarmed George Floyd being murdered by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota where Officer Derek Chauvin is seen kneeling on the neck of the handcuffed Floyd as he cried out in desperation for help before taking his last breath. In that moment of racial reckoning that led to nationwide protests and calls for police reform, while the nation and world also contended with the high-tide of the Covid-19 epidemic and a disastrous national response by the first Trump administration that ended with hundreds of thousands of deaths, many Americans seemed to acknowledge for the first time the need for substantive action amid the constant loop of police brutality against unarmed Black people and the ever-present realities of racial injustice woven into the fabric of American society.

We saw major American corporations make monetary pledges, statements and commitments came from institutions of higher education to work toward racial reconciliation, local municipalities took up reparative justice initiatives, anti-racist workshops and panels seemed endless, and increased Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that for better or worse all performed feats of acrobatic empathy. A frequent occurrence during times of national racial distress, which was made evermore salient with the uncertainty of the future, was the call for economic investment in Black communities and commitments toward ensuring that equitable opportunities existed for marginalized communities. In other words, capitalism and its fallacies emerged as the most viable solution to addressing all of the systemic issues that continue to plague Black America when considering health, incarceration, education, environmental racism, racial capitalism, and high unemployment. In the midst of this came once again the #BankBlack and #BuyBlack movements that renewed interest in Black capitalism.

In 2020 in particular, Black banking received a significant amount of attention in myriad ways. On March 3, 2020, Apple TV released its film The Banker (2020) starring executive producer Samuel L. Jackson alongside co-stars Anthony Mackie and Nia Long. The Banker, based on the true story of two Black Los Angeles businessmen turned bankers, follows the rise of Texas native Bernard Garrett (played by Anthony Mackie), a genius level entrepreneur who leaves his Texas hometown for Los Angeles, California where he owns a paper waste business before transitioning to being a real estate investor and eventually partners with his white landlord in purchasing properties across Los Angeles. He eventually buys an apartment building from his landlord Mr. Barker and thereafter stakes his claim in renting to African Americans and changing the housing landscape from white to Black in neighborhood after neighborhood. His ultimate real estate acquisition comes when he partners with another Black businessman Joe Morris (played by Samuel L. Jackson) whereby they devise a scheme to purchase the largest building in downtown Los Angeles, which serves as the headquarters for a number of white banks in the city, many of which had refused to lend to Garrett and other Black people in Los Angeles.

In doing so, the two Black businessmen have to seek an end-run around the typical approach to purchasing prime downtown real estate by soliciting the services of one Matthew Stein (played by Nicholas Hoult), an underachieving and once-failed white entrepreneur to negotiate the purchase on their behalf because none of the downtown properties were Black owned and that’s how it would have stayed. In the film, Garrett and Morris train Stein in the essentials of golf for on the course dealmaking and the fundamentals of finance just enough for him to successfully negotiate the purchase of the Banker’s building. The duo basks in the one upmanship but Garrett has larger plans. He comes up with the idea to use the third-party purchase by their white conspirator to purchase a for sale white bank in Mainland, Texas. The bank’s ownership and depositors were all-white. They replicated their earlier approach by having Stein pose as the purchaser while they surveilled the negotiations by acting again as janitor and chauffer. They succeed at buying the bank, though Stein acts as the familiar white face of the bank’s management. They’re able to buy the bank through loans from another white bank in Los Angeles. They eventually get tied up in the latter lending institution’s financial misdeeds and they’re soon found out. Along the way, Stein, acting on his own accord, purchases another Texas bank without the consent of Garrett and Morris. Everything collapses when one John McClellan, a staunch racist Arkansas senator over the Subcommittee on Investigations decides to take on the issue of regulation at national banks. The Mainland Bank became the target of hearings and they are arrested as Stein testified against them in exchange for immunity. Ultimately, Garrett and Morris are sentenced to federal prison.

In January, Sauntore Thomas, a Black Airforce veteran was refused service by a TCF Bank in Livonia, Michigan when he attempted to deposit several checks from a recent racial discrimination settlement case he recently won. In August, two of the largest Black banks in the country the City First Bank in Washington, D.C. and Broadway Federal Bank in Los Angeles, California merged to become CityFirstBroadway with over $1 billion in resources making it the largest Black-owned bank in the United States. In September, Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf apologized for remarks he made in reference to the extent of diversity at the bank. Scharf said there was “a very limited pool of Black talent to recruit from,“ meaning there were not enough Black banking professionals prepared to take on higher ranking positions at large banks such as Wells Fargo. In walking back his comments, Scharf said he made “an insensitive comment reflecting my own unconscous bias,” and “there are many talented diverse individuals working at Wells Fargo (WFC) and thorughout the financial services industry and I never meant to imply otherwise.” Moreover, “we have not done enough to improve diversity, especially at senior leadership levels.” In October, rapper Killer Mike, former United Nations Ambassador and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, and television executive Ryan Glover launched Bank Greenwood, a digital bank whose symbolic name came from one of the early twentieth century's Black Wall Streets located in the Greenwood commercial district in Tulsa, Oklahoma with $3 million in startup capital. In December, the streaming Giant Netflix pledged to deposit $100 million in Black banks over a ten-year period. In January 2022, Ryan Coogler, director of the Black Panther (2018) blockbuster had the police called on him by a Bank of America employee when he went to withdraw a sizable amount of money from the bank in a case of “banking while Black.”

All of these examples in their own way point to the convergence of the past with the present. In this way, they force us to consider the broader history and survival of Black banking and its impact on Black economic life both through historical and contemporary observations. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Black banking experienced significant changes. On April 8, 2011, the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company in Richmond, Virginia, at the time the oldest Black bank in operation in the United States founded in 1903 by businesswoman Maggie Lena Walker, the first woman bank president in the United States, was acquired and became Premier Bank. In the process, the bank was no longer a Black bank. A decade later, the Black-owned Liberty Bank in New Orleans, Louisiana acquired the Tri-State Bank of Memphis, which took Liberty Bank’s resources to nearly $1 billion. The older Tri-State Bank had opened in December 1946, as the first Black bank established after World War II and the first in Memphis in twenty years since the merged Fraternal and Solvent Savings Bank and Trust Company closed its doors in 1927. In the South, Black banks still exist in Durham, Atlanta, and Nashville, three of the most important cities for Black economic life from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century.